How Emotion Regulation Shapes Well-Being in Adult Siblings of Autistic People

The bond between brothers and sisters is the longest relationship most people will ever have, outlasting parents, friends, and often partners. For young adults with an autistic sibling, that relationship can carry a distinctive emotional weight, and a new study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders suggests that the way these siblings regulate their emotions may be a hidden lever shaping both the quality of the bond and their own psychological well-being. The research, conducted by Carolyn M. Shivers of Niagara University and Chung Eun Lee of Sungkyunkwan University, offers one of the most detailed looks yet at how warmth, closeness, and emotional coping strategies interact in adulthood, a life stage that has been largely overlooked in favor of childhood and adolescence.

The study set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do young adults who have an autistic sibling experience their family relationships and their emotional lives differently from those whose siblings are not disabled? To find out, the researchers recruited 187 non-disabled young adults between the ages of 18 and 26, all of whom had at least one sibling. Of these, 42 reported on a relationship with an autistic brother or sister, while 145 reported on a sibling without disabilities. Participants completed a roughly fifteen-minute online survey hosted on the REDCap platform, drawing from university classes, the SPARK nationwide autism research registry, and the paid recruitment platform Prolific. The design was cross-sectional, meaning it captured a single moment in time rather than tracking change over years.

The measurement battery was unusually comprehensive. Sibling warmth was assessed with the Warmth subscale of the Adult Sibling Relationship Questionnaire, a 25-item instrument asking how positively respondents feel about their sibling, with items such as how much the pair knows about each other and how much they accept each other’s lifestyle. Closeness was measured with a four-item Intimacy Scale probing whether the sibling is a source of advice and unconditional acceptance. Emotion regulation was captured with the widely used Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, which distinguishes two fundamentally different strategies: reappraisal, in which a person changes how they think about a situation to change how they feel, and suppression, in which a person keeps their emotions to themselves. Well-being was measured across four dimensions: gratitude, life satisfaction, optimism, and psychological distress.

The results confirmed a pattern that previous meta-analyses had hinted at but had rarely extended into adulthood. Young adults with autistic siblings reported significantly lower warmth and closeness in their sibling relationships, and significantly higher levels of psychological distress, than their peers with non-disabled siblings. They also reported lower gratitude, lower life satisfaction, and lower optimism. Notably, the two groups did not differ significantly in their typical use of reappraisal or suppression, suggesting that the coping tools themselves are similar across groups even when the emotional landscape surrounding them is not. The researchers controlled for demographic differences between the groups, including participant age, gender, sibling gender, and socioeconomic status, all of which differed significantly between the two samples.

The correlational findings painted a coherent picture of how these variables interlock. Across the entire sample, both sibling warmth and closeness were positively correlated with emotional reappraisal, gratitude, life satisfaction, and optimism, and negatively correlated with emotional suppression. Closeness was also negatively correlated with distress. Reappraisal and suppression themselves were not correlated with each other, underscoring that they are not simply opposite ends of a single spectrum but independent strategies with opposite relationships to well-being: reappraisal tracked with gratitude, while suppression moved against it.

The heart of the study, however, lay in its mediation analyses. Using the PROCESS statistical macro, the researchers tested whether emotion regulation strategies carried part of the effect of sibling relationship quality onto well-being outcomes. They did. Both suppression and reappraisal partially mediated the pathways from sibling warmth and closeness to gratitude, life satisfaction, and optimism. In statistical terms, the indirect effects were significant, with 95 percent confidence intervals excluding zero, while the direct effects of the sibling relationship on well-being also remained significant. This partial mediation is important: it means emotion regulation explains some, but not all, of the connection between how close siblings feel and how well they fare psychologically. The sibling bond matters in its own right, but the way a person manages emotion acts as a conduit through which part of that bond’s influence flows.

One of the most intriguing results emerged when the researchers tested whether these pathways differed between the two groups, a technique known as moderated mediation. After controlling for demographic differences, sibling group significantly moderated only one pathway: the indirect effect of sibling intimacy on gratitude through reappraisal. For young adults with autistic siblings, this pathway was statistically significant, while for those with non-disabled siblings it was not. The authors caution that this single significant result could be a Type I error, a false positive arising from the large number of analyses performed. But they also offer a compelling interpretation: because autistic individuals may express intimacy and social connection differently, greater use of reappraisal may allow siblings to reinterpret interactions with their autistic brother or sister in new ways, ultimately fostering greater gratitude for the relationship.

The broader pattern of results carries a striking implication: aside from that one exception, the relationships among sibling quality, emotion regulation, and well-being operated similarly whether or not a participant had an autistic sibling. In other words, while the levels of warmth, gratitude, and optimism differ between the groups, the underlying psychological machinery connecting these variables appears to be shared. This suggests that interventions teaching adaptive emotion regulation, such as reappraisal training or coping education, might benefit siblings of autistic individuals without needing to be heavily adapted for disability-specific contexts. At the same time, efforts aimed directly at improving the sibling relationship itself likely do need to account for the specific dynamics of autistic relationships, since the measured gaps in warmth and closeness were real and persistent.

The study is not without limitations, and the authors are candid about them. Only the non-disabled sibling’s perspective was captured; autistic individuals may value different qualities in a sibling relationship that standard quantitative measures, normed on non-autistic populations, simply do not detect. The researchers collected no detailed information about the autistic siblings themselves, such as whether they lived with the participant or how they communicated, any of which could shape the reported relationship. All data were self-reported, the autistic-sibling sample was comparatively small, the racial composition of the sample was limited, and the cross-sectional design means the direction of the mediation pathways cannot be definitively established. Greater use of emotional suppression among siblings of autistic individuals could plausibly be both a cause and a consequence of lower relationship quality.

Even with those caveats, the findings point toward concrete avenues for support. Because emotional suppression was negatively tied to sibling warmth, closeness, gratitude, life satisfaction, and optimism, giving young adults alternatives to bottling up their feelings could improve both their own well-being and their family bonds. Reappraisal practices, meanwhile, could help siblings critically examine how they interpret an autistic sibling’s actions and communication styles. The authors also argue that future research must look beyond the family to societal forces, citing recent work on ableism and affiliate stigma suggesting that discrimination shapes outcomes for family members of autistic people. What emerges from this study is a nuanced message: the psychological echoes of growing up alongside an autistic sibling persist well into adulthood, but the mechanisms linking family bonds to well-being are fundamentally human and, crucially, modifiable. Teaching young adults to reframe rather than suppress their emotions may be one of the most practical ways to strengthen both the longest relationship of their lives and their own happiness within it.

Subject of Research: Emotion regulation and sibling relationship quality among young adult siblings of autistic individuals

Article Title: Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation and Sibling Relationship Quality Among Young Adult Siblings of Individuals With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder

Article References: Mediating Role of Emotion Regulation and Sibling Relationship Quality Among Young Adult Siblings of Individuals With and Without Autism Spectrum Disorder. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07537-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07537-4

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, siblings, emotion regulation, emotional suppression, cognitive reappraisal, sibling warmth, well-being, life satisfaction, gratitude, optimism, psychological distress, young adulthood